Smart friends ask good questions

How do repetition and ritual, secular and religious, work to create characters?

Where is the break? In the character/the code/the pattern?
How do you experience your mind embodied in the universe?
What happens when you interview your characters?
gracias, Ana.

Got to spend time with the funny and talented Jen Simmons this weekend. She was carrying around Spaces of Creation: The Creative Process of Playwriting. Flipping through the book, I had the chance to re-experience all of my resistance to theatre process, theatre games, theatre exercises. I'm a writer, not an actor! (This was the sentiment behind one species of the laughing fuck yous I used to give Sharon in workshops.) When I confessed my petulant disappointment ("I thought it was a book to read, not a book to do") Jen asked a great question just with her eyebrows. Yeah, I know. I gotta go there.

Then, of course, there are Sharon's questions: What are you feeling? What is that about? How does it affect your writing?

So: the resistance to theatre process exercises.

Inexpert. Nervous, embarassed.

Like I'm not in my body enough to do this kind of thing. Even though doing it would help me get information from my body. Like I don't have that kind of visual imagination. Even though doing it would help me connect with the mind's eye that is there, that sees and hears concrete, physical things (otherwise I wouldn't have accidentally begun writing a piece for performance when I intended to write poems). My mind is more than just an abstraction factory.

The worry about not being able to do something well--not being able to do a process exercise well--what is that about? What is my commitment to embodied imagining being something that those other people do, not me? Oh, damn, look there's my white supremacy lessons showing. Get your hands dirty, whitegirl. And my diaspora rising-class Jew: touch the earth, it won't kill you.

And how does it affect my writing? There are days when I feel like I'm dragging Neshomeh's body into the piece. Adding movement to monologues. The character based on my grandmother is an offstage voice. I've been persistently puzzled by how to show, and not just have characters talk about, what I'm thinking about spacetime/history land. Ana and I talked a lot yesterday about movement through time and space. How does it feel when I'm writing? How does that inform how characters move through time and space on the stage? Or how time and space move through them?

Last week's pënz poll:
Experience is the function of perception. Perception is the function of time. What are the three modalities of time?
The Winner, with 57% of the vote: “duration & feeling & incorporeality”

Also the three modalities of a performance work.

(Who was the poet who said that for a reader, a poem is an experience in time?)